Marketing automation workflows are essential to every business, as they make the relationship between the brand and customers easier and better customized to their buying cycle. These days, sales cycles in B2B are much longer than they used to be and involve multiple stakeholders. That’s where automation comes in!
Automated workflows eliminate manual work and deliver the right marketing message to the right person at the right stage of the buying cycle. This helps businesses stay organized, cut costs by eliminating the need for marketing assistants, and grow revenue faster.
If you aren’t using marketing automation workflows in your business, you are missing out and letting your competitors have an innovative edge in delighting their prospects. Here is what you can do instead to stay competitive!
What Are Marketing Automation Workflows?
You can think of marketing automation workflows as an algorithm that keeps track of your leads and provides them with messaging that aligns with the next step in their buyer journey. They are rule-based sequences that guide potential buyers through your nurture process by responding to their actions and behavior.
Each workflow is usually comprised of the following components:
- Triggers that initiate the workflow, such as a form submission
- Conditions that determine different segmentation paths based on job title or engagement
- Actions that nurture, such as email drip campaigns and ad targeting
- Timing and segmentation that personalize the journey for each lead
In the B2B context, lead nurture automation is more complex, and guiding leads through a sales journey is more complex. That is why automation workflow tools are used to map out when and how messages are sent and what strategy works best to engage multiple stakeholders without manual effort.
Workflows Every B2B Company Should Be Using
Lead Capture & Qualification Workflows
This is one of the basic automation lead capture sequences every business should run to collect form submissions and sync leads to the CRM. Qualification workflows extend beyond simple lead capture to score leads based on behavioral and occupational data, which is then assigned to the sales teams for more personalized relationship-building.
Nowadays, AI-powered predictive lead scoring helps to prioritize high-intent leads faster and more accurately.
Our top three lead capture workflows for B2B businesses include: Marketo Engage, HubSpot Marketing Hub, and Salesforce Pardot.
Automated Lead Nurturing Sequences
The power of automated lead nurture sequences is keeping prospects engaged over time so that businesses build trust and lower resistance to objections buyers may have to working with them. By being in their prospects’ inboxes often, B2B businesses strengthen their branding and position themselves as leaders in their field.
Nurture emails usually begin with welcome emails and are then customized to the prospect, ensuring that each lead receives the right content at the right time based on interest and intent. The goal is to shift from market-qualified leads (MQL) to sales-qualified leads (SQL) based on leads’ click-through behavior and engagement.
The following are our recommended tools that help B2B businesses with lead automation: HubSpot Marketing Automation, Salesforce + Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (formerly Pardot), and ActiveCampaign.
Account-Based Marketing (ABM) Activation Workflows
Account-Based Marketing activation workflows help B2B teams focus their nurturing efforts on high-value target accounts. These workflows can identify key accounts that have high business potential and automate outreach across various content and social media channels.
They work with intent signals to trigger personalized engagement through email drip campaigns, LinkedIn, and paid ads. The best part about ABM is that its workflows provide alerts to keep marketing and sales teams informed in real-time. Depending on the nature of your business, ABM workflows can help you identify the “big fish in the sea” and effectively nurture the relationship long-term.
When it comes to ABM activation workflows, the following are our top tools to help you nurture high-value accounts: Demandbase One, 6sense, and Terminus.
Customer Onboarding & Retention Workflows
We’ve discussed what workflows businesses need to keep potential customers engaged, but some workflows nurture customers after they’ve made a purchase. These customer onboarding and retention workflows guide customers after purchase and keep engaging them through product usage tips, updates, and new promotions.
They are great for renewal reminders and retention marketing to keep high-level clients engaged and interested in a continued business relationship.
For customer retention workflows, our team is keen on the following platforms to help you engage with your high-value clients: Gainsight (Customer Success Platform), ChurnZero, and Rocketlane (Onboarding and Execution Workflows).
Sales Enablement & Deal Progression Workflows
Marketing handles the early stages of the sales cycle, while sales teams concentrate on the later stages of interest. In order to hone in on the most interested prospects, the sales enablement workflows keep the pipeline moving by automating every stage of the deal process.
These automation workflows trigger real-time notifications, automatically create tasks, and send follow-up reminders to representatives so that they don’t miss critical engagement opportunities. These automation tools help with faster response times and shorter sales cycles, helping businesses with the bottom of the funnel targeting.
Our recommendation for the best quality B2B sales cycle workflows includes Salesforce Sales Cloud, Outreach.io, and Highspot.
Newest Trends in Marketing Automation Workflows
Like almost every industry, the newest marketing automation workflows are shaped by AI’s predictive and analytical capabilities. In the context of marketing, AI helps in analyzing the data and segmenting the leads for a personalized approach. Rather than a set sequence, the workflow should be dynamic in nature, depending on the behavior of the users in real-time.
This leads us to the next trend in marketing automation, which is personalization. AI helps in identifying the leads that are most likely to convert and then sends them a personalized message based on their perceived interest.
By embracing AI and moving beyond basic automation, B2B businesses can stay more competitive and experience better conversion rates.
Personalization is here to stay, and for businesses that seek better marketing outcomes, ensuring that messaging feels hand-crafted to each lead is the best way to see better returns on marketing investment.
Automation Best Practices for Successful Marketing
Lead nurture automation is here to stay, and businesses that adopt it will be at the forefront of their industries. With the following automation best practices, you can begin to modernize your lead generation with tools that will save you time and resources.
- Start with clear goals & mapping: At the beginning stage, define what each workflow is meant to achieve. Does it qualify as a lead, or is it supposed to accelerate deal formation? Your expectations are key to reverse-engineering the right strategy and expectations for the workflow.
- Maintain clean data & hygiene: Accurate data is at the heart of every workflow. Regularly clean your CRM to remove redundancies and ensure that the automation runs correctly.
- Test & iterate regularly: Testing helps to improve workflow strategies and sales outcomes. By reviewing test subject lines and messaging (usually through click-through-rates), you can increase engagement with your workflows and achieve better conversion results.
- Align marketing and sales efforts: Always establish the correct handoff points so that the marketing automation workflows can support both teams smoothly.
- Measure engagement and conversions: By tracking important metrics such as engagement and funnel conversion rates, you can easily discern what’s not working and continuously improve your results.
Lead Nurturing Automation Specialists
High-value clients require more time and effort to convert in a competitive online market. Marketing automation workflows make the process of lead conversion faster and more efficient by freeing up busy teams to concentrate on strategy, creative work, and sales.If you want to streamline your lead generation and retention workflows to experience tangible business growth, automated workflows are a must! If you’re looking to make these automation best practices easier to adapt, contact our B2B nurture lead specialists to see how we can help you customize your workflows for better business outcomes.